You've probably seen the ads. Lonely ladies want to meet you! Thousands of girls available now! Just $2.99 per message! For entertainment purposes only!
It's amazing that with all the chat rooms, instant messaging and virtual worlds available online, people still pay exorbitant fees to exchange erotic text messages.
No pictures, no videos (though some service providers do offer those services as well). Mainly, we're talking about paying for sex chat over text messages, with all the limitations that go along with SMS.
This is a very private world. Companies like MyTxt do not want to destroy the client's fantasy that he has a chance at meeting a horny housewife or lonely lady through the pay-per-message service.
But you know what? I'll bet you not one in a thousand believes that he's going to meet women for fly-by sex through SMS; that's not the point. If nothing else, it would be cheaper to hire a prostitute than to exchange enough $2.99 text messages to let a woman get to know you well enough to agree to meet. And then pay for the hotel room.
As for that one in a thousand, I love you for being so sincere and trusting. And I suggest you stop reading this column now so that I don't puncture the bubble of your innocence with the stiletto heels of my experience.
"Most of the guys aren't thinking that they're going to meet you, they just want to talk about sex," says "GiGi," a "text actress" who spoke to me on condition of anonymity.
"It's part of what makes me not feel bad about what I do," she says. "They know they're not going to meet anyone, but they do it anyway. Some are lonely and just want to chat about their great-aunt Ninny."
GiGi is a stay-at-home mom who works a three-hour shift, five days a week, earning about 8 cents per message -- about $300 to $400 per month for the family nut, she says.
That was my first surprise in our conversation: that the clients pay dollars per message, and the talent gets less than a dime. It reminds me of being recruited to do phone sex, a decade ago; the pay was about $12 per hour but only for the minutes you actually had a client on the line. It might take all morning to rack up half an hour's pay.
(I later discovered that GiGi earns the higher end of the scale; text actresses tend to get paid 3 to 9 cents per message, sometimes with bonuses based on quotas.)
The second surprise was more pleasant. Throughout our interview, GiGi referred to the text exchange as a story.
This is a concept I try to convey when people ask me how anyone could get turned on by a computer, much less have sex with one. It's not about the technology -- it's about the connection, and the shared story you co-create when you make that human bond.
"I used to be a storyteller at a park," GiGi tells me. "It's the same type of thing. You're a persona, and you're playing a part for these people."
And the third surprise was how that story unfolds. I thought erotic texting was like phone sex: You answer the phone and have a conversation with the client, trying to give him his money's worth while keeping him on the phone long enough to make your employer happy.
But with text, it's not a one-on-one relationship between client and provider. A whole group of text actresses respond to a single client, and each text actress responds to many clients in any given minute.
"It's like that game where everyone tells a story. You start telling it and stop midway and then someone else picks it up," she says.
The messages come in to a group queue, where a text actress responds; it's all done through the computer and the internet on the provider side, not mobile devices. When the client replies, a different woman might respond to it. A few minutes might pass and several messages might be exchanged before the same actress answers the same client's text.
"You have to follow the flow of the story and continue where they left off," says GiGi.
The actresses keep track of important information about each client -- marital status, hair color, anything he says about himself. They are careful not to reveal that he is talking to several women, not just one.
And if he doesn't like the collective persona? He can request a different one, by sending a particular code or pressing a button, and the actresses change the tone of their responses.
"We make her look different, or be in a different location, but it's really still us," she says. "We'll hit 'reset' and make her a traveling nurse."
GiGi keeps handy a list of women's names and occupations that would give her plenty of time for texting, much like I used to keep a dictionary of classical mythology around when I chatted so I could pun on my handle "Aphrodite."
Of the clients, she says that many just want to connect. Others are handicapped; still others turn toward text because they carry their mobile devices everywhere and aren't always near a computer.
Most of her clients are in the United Kingdom and Europe, where adult content services are more accepted than in the United States and internet access is more expensive, less ubiquitous.
"The rules (about adult text content) are stricter in America, so you can't get very explicit," she says. "It's actually much harder because you have to come up with friendly, generic chat when the guys all want to talk about sex."
The actresses stockpile variations on responses to common questions, too. No, I don't feel comfortable giving you my mobile number, I'd rather text you through the service. The camera part of my phone is broken.
"Some of the guys get wise real quick and go away," GiGi says. But some don't; they want the fantasy, and in fact, with a creative pool of women creating a composite persona, each client gets to talk with his ideal fantasy lover.
And if you've ever tried to craft an effective, interactive erotic story using posts of 160 characters or less, you know that being a good text actress is a lot more difficult than it might sound.
Horny housewife ads aside, most of the women are indeed moms who take the gig because of the flexible hours and the ability to work from home, says GiGi. But she plans to quit next summer, partly because the bills will be caught up and partly because her kids are learning to read.
"Right now, we just tell them that I'm working," she says. "But we don't want the children to grow up thinking that all my creativity goes toward chatting with horny men."
See you next Friday,
Regina Lynn
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Regina Lynn ([email protected]) recently bought a new cell phone specifically because it is so comfortable to text on.
